Brokerage

Bank of America Merrill Lynch rolled out a new market access platform on Wednesday that performs government-mandated risk controls while minimizing latency.

The trading community likes the proposed limit up/limit down rule, but it still has quibbles.

Here's the nuts and bolts of limit up/limit down, plus some of the criticisms that practitioners of various stripes see with the proposal.

Liquidnet said its trading volume moved 2 percent ahead of last year, with an 18 percent jump in June.

The industry got some needed breathing room. The Securities and Exchange Commission decided in late June to postpone compliance with a cornerstone of its sponsored-access rule for four months. That gives broker-dealers time to figure out how to build credit checks into their businesses that serve high-frequency traders.

Now that the first phase of the market access rule has gone into effect, brokers are looking ahead to the next stage of the rule, when they will need to perform aggregate credit and capital checks for their clients and themselves. Originally, the Securities and Exchange Commission planned to implement the entire rule on July 14, but after receiving requests from the industry, it delayed key aspects of the rule until Nov. 30.

In an effort to reduce costs, ITG reorganized its management, causing an exodus of six managing directors from the firm. Three of the senior executives were members of ITG's management committee.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's new market access rule takes effect Thursday, and some fear high-frequency traders could skirt the rule's ban on so-called "naked access" by becoming broker-dealers. But experts say those fears are overblown.

Investor appetite for exchange traded funds picked up last month, with $8.1 billion flowing into ETFs in June, according to numbers released on Thursday by Birinyi Associates.

Tbricks, a European execution management system vendor, has teamed up with U.S. agency broker Lime Brokerage to offer European high-frequency traders access to the U.S. markets.